


Charred

by orphan_account



Series: Rush Summer [5]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Closeted Character, F/M, Period-Typical Racism, Rush Valley, Trans Female Character, Transphobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-19
Updated: 2014-01-19
Packaged: 2018-01-09 06:04:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1142359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The house crouches at the swoop of the cul-de-sac. The flashing yellow and green lights brightening the path transform the peaked roof into a pair of dark wings spreading over the back of a grotesque demon digging its claws into the soil. From inside comes a music with a swinging beat. On the lawn mills a medley of party-goers, most of them fairly young. When she attempts to dip into the leylines of chi, the overpowering luminosity, like she transmuted a star in her palms, nearly spiritually blinds her, deafens her, smashes her pulse until she feels her heart crashing against her sternum. Gasping, Lan Fan resurfaces, blinking rapidly until the afterspots of white wear away at the rim of her vision. She has guarded the Emperor in the most crowded of imperial festivals and gatherings with far more points of chi than this foolish Amestrisian party. And yet the sheer spiritual noise of the souls within the house bids her squeeze Ling’s hand and frown.</p><p>She refuses to let him from her sight.</p><p>-------------------------------------------------------</p><p>Or, in which Ling traps Lan Fan by the punchbowl, Paninya almost wrenches an idiot for hurting her friend's feelings, and a poor phonograph laments a cruel world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Charred

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warning for gore, transphobia, and use of racial slurs. The depictions of violence are not that graphic, nor are the injuries, but I describe the pain in detail, so please use your best judgment. Consider it the "rated PG-13" of violence/gore.
> 
> I imagine that over the past two years, Lan Fan has learned not to go into crazy-angry-reckless mode when emotionally wounded, instead falling into a cold sort of emotional shutdown until it was safe to reveal her true self again. This is based on her behaviour during her first fight with Edward Elric versus that on the Promised Day, wherein her only signal of emotion during the battle proper was that single teardrop. Indeed, she displayed her emotion afterwards. Keep this in mind, because the next chapter is going to be a literal hell to write for me, emotionally speaking.
> 
> The OCs in this chapter aren't anything special. Skylar and Robin Oliver are Aerugans in their early twenties. Skylar has some minor training in medicine. Neither of them will be too important for the fic. The "gang" Lan Fan finds outside may be mentioned in later chapters as part of the general Rush Valley worldbuilding, but, again, they're not too vital.
> 
> A major thank-you to my readers who thoughtfully left me kudos on the last instalment. Your appreciation and feedback made it possible for me to churn this out in record time. Keep on bein' awesome!
> 
> As always, if I ever deal with something such as the trans female main character of this fic poorly, _please_ let me know. That's absolutely the last thing I want to do.

The house crouches at the swoop of the cul-de-sac. The flashing yellow and green lights brightening the path transform the peaked roof into a pair of dark wings spreading over the back of a grotesque demon digging its claws into the soil. From inside comes a music with a swinging beat. On the lawn mills a medley of party-goers, most of them fairly young. She spots a few stragglers pushing thirty, but the vast majority look to be in their early twenties. Automail flashes each time the clouds swirl and briefly part. Piercings, as well: not merely in the ears, like Winry, but the occasional nose or lip or eyebrow slotted with a light-catching stud or ring. The women wear miniature skirts or thigh-chopped pants and shirts two sizes too small; the men go shirtless, stopping just short of removing their jeans or trunks entirely. Lan Fan captures Ling’s hand tightly in hers. Less due to taking the opportunity to intertwine their warm fingers and more due to not wanting to lose him in the constantly shifting crowd. When she attempts to dip into the leylines of _chi_ , the overpowering luminosity, like she transmuted a star in her palms, nearly spiritually blinds her, deafens her, smashes her pulse until she feels her heart crashing against her sternum. Gasping, Lan Fan resurfaces, blinking rapidly until the afterspots of white wear away at the rim of her vision. She has guarded the Emperor in the most crowded of imperial festivals and gatherings with far more points of _chi_ than this foolish Amestrisian party. And yet the sheer spiritual _noise_ of the souls within the house bids her squeeze Ling’s hand and frown.

She refuses to let him from her sight.

An hour ago Winry proffered what she termed a make-over. Lan Fan indicated her response by instantly altering the topic to that of her automail arm. Presently, noting the reddened lips, luscious locks, and dark, lash-fluttering eyes of the women who could convince a god to cast himself from the heavens for her, the vassal feels herself a water buffalo in a glassblower’s studio. Fortunately her missing arm means little but a needed repair to a town built on automail. And at least she forewent her usual pitch bodyguard’s uniform in favour of civilian clothing: A loose white shirt with sleeves to the elbow, black trousers to the knee, and sandals.

The heat, she has already decided, will not force her hand if she _melts_.

Ling favours bottoms that closely mirror his white Xingese pants, although for his upper torso he has donned an Amestris jacket so thin the fabric hangs translucent from his shoulders. His bare chest—and equally bare abdominals—unleash a stampede of horses in her stomach. She looks away, nearly biting off her tongue. Up ahead, already somewhat mingling with the throng, Winry bares her midriff in a sweeping navy skirt that rides halfway up her thighs, a flowing black tank top that cuts off below her breasts, and shiny white heels visible from anywhere in the mass of bodies. Her dark boots an ideal counterpoint for Winry’s brilliant shoes, Paninya has arrived with a skin-hugging shirt concealing the top of her jean shorts. For once she’s let her hair down, and the small crop accentuates the slope of her neck.

Something tugs her hand. “I think the food’s over there,” Ling says in Xingese. He guides her through the pressing crowd into the house proper; within an even greater number of individuals pack, jostling against one another. The music belts out from a phonograph positioned on a raised platform in the centre of the room. Lan Fan would bet every cen and yuan to her name that someone will either break the snail-shell or else steal it entirely by midnight. A white table comes into sight: A massive bowl of a reddish liquid mixed with ice resides as the centrepiece. Bottles of liquor become sentries, dishes of finger food—chicken, fish, pulled pork and beef, pastries, potatoes steaming and buttered with abandon—the platoons. Ling snags a ceramic cup and drags it through the crimson liquid. It sparkles in the light. Lan Fan grimaces.

“I wouldn’t drink that.”

Ling shrugs. “It kinda looks like Stone, doesn’t it?”

“Which would be my point, yes.”

His gaze visibly flicks from the shimmering drink clutched between his thumb and forefinger to the labels on the alcohol and back again. Experimentally he sniffs. Sips. Lan Fan almost senses the steam rising from the top of her head, not unlike one of those buttered potatoes. Ling licks his lips. “Tastes fruity. A little sweet, but that’s Amestris for you, hm? _Such a nice country_ ,” he remarks, adding the last phrase in Amestrisian. A girl across the punch bowl giggles, her blush highlighting the freckles strewn over the bridge of her nose. To Lan Fan he presents the cup as one would a crown to a king. “Want some?”

“To check for poison?” He throws back his head and laughs. “If so, you should have specified from the beginning.”

“You’re perfect,” he says in the same breath that he lifts the liquid to his lips. When he smiles his teeth bear faint reddish stains. His expression twists into the definition of disgust. She raises her eyebrows. “Too sweet. Like I just stuffed an entire beehive in my mouth and drank the honey.”

Lan Fan takes one of the cooked fish. Silvery-brown, crisped, approximately the length of her palm. Sniff. Bite. The distinct salty taste of a distant sea calms her, and the spine and tail rip away easily from the surprisingly soft meat within the crunchy outer shell. Swallowing, she eats a lucky seven one by one before glancing up to find Ling watching her, his lips ghosting the curve of an upside-down rainbow. She discards the spine of the final fish in a rapidly overflowing rubbish bin. Her timbre is staccato-curt. “They do not a true Xingese dinner make—” Her mouth salivates at the thought. “—but they’re edible.” Hastily she tacks on, “I _suppose_ , in an Amestrisian sort of way,” to counter the grin spreading over his brightened features.

“Admit it.” He finds the hem of her shirt with his fingers and tickles her ribs. Squeaking embarrassingly Lan Fan rolls back on her heels. Ephemeral weight on her shoulder blades. An indignant yelp. To the busty woman she has mistakenly bowled over she apologises, once in Xingese by her error, once in Amestrisian. Ling helps her up prior to Lan Fan’s intervention. In the process he traps his vassal against the wall opposite the table, his hip pressing into the apex of her thighs. He angles his head to gaze at her from behind lidded eyes. “Amestris isn’t such a bad country after all, is it?”

“I never said it was.” Even the Xingese syllables tie her tongue into painful knots. A strange “light-headedness diffuses through her muted hearing, and she flattens herself against the wall in her panic at his warmth and heaviness and proximity close enough that she feels his breath on her cheeks. The vassal focuses on anything, _anything_ except for the blood rapidly draining from her face and pooling somewhere else entirely. His eyes flashing with his overt giddiness, Ling _giggles_. Then he reaches up with his right hand and extends his forefinger. Cross-eyed, she shivers from the intensity of the mischievous spark alighting the infinite abyss of his irises.

He smiles. Not a smirk, but a genuine smile that crinkles the corners of his eyes and dimples his cheeks. Resting his weight upon, he gently taps the cartilage nub at the tip of her nose. In a voice more tender than she could have imagined issuing from his vocal cords, he murmurs: “ _Boop_.”

The entire room fades away but for a quiet, incessant rippling of the crowd’s _chi_ against hers. He is cradling her jaw in his palms, and his hands feel so soft and warm against her skin, like heated silk, and his fingers brush her jawline and tickle the junction of her throat, and she memorises the exact terrain, the dips and ridges, the familiar-unfamiliar creases of his flesh. His exhalations warm her mouth. Gently he tilts her chin up until he encloses her in this tiny space between his body, the wall, and his heavy gaze—pressing down upon her like gravity—locking her muscles in place. He runs his tongue over his slightly parted lips, wet and shiny from a thin film of saliva. Slowly, deliberately, he lowers his head. Ghosts his lips over hers, and she _feels_ the smile curve his mouth.

Him. Her. And—and the—the _thing_ —

Her hands clamp onto his wrists and jerk. The left side of her face burns from the abrupt chill. With a frenzied motion she slaps his other arm away. “ _Lan Fa_ —” he yelps, a high-pitched dog’s whine shattering the second syllable and her heart at once, but she drowns his words in the deafening _chi_. Dancers suffocate her; the phonograph threatens to tear through her eardrums in one fell swoop; some man gropes her ass and is rewarded with a broken arm. An opening from somewhere ahead of her where the _chi_ thins out. Push. Elbow to the rib. Heel to the shin. Hand to the knob. Turning. Open.

Cool air. Upon arriving in this hellhole where the very sky burns, she commented to Master Ling that Rush Valley could not be cold if it snowed for forty years. Yet after the belly of the beast, the evening kisses the fluid inferno bottled in her skin. Inhaling through her nose and exhaling through her mouth, Lan Fan kneels on the cement of the Olivers’ back porch. Her neck aches, as do her shoulders. Steadily her vision adjusts to the night-time dimness of the moon and stars: The Olivers have not hung the disorienting lights here, and for that she whispers a half-formed prayer.

 _Chi_ flickers; she raises her head, wincing at the tension in her neck, to see a small gaggle of stray dogs, one of whom is actually a dog. Large, reddish-brown, shaggy. Wagging its tail, it starts to bound towards her, but its owner, a wiry boy with a shock of scarlet hair, snags the collar. “Missy, the hell did I tell ya about—heyo. Check it.”

The boy is flanked by two others and girl. A dark-skinned one with long hair tied back in a ponytail gives her a two-finger salute. “Hey there,” he calls, waving. “You sick? Had too much t’ drink?”

A tall one with strawberry blond slicked back and the delicate build of a Cretan nudges Ponytail. “She’s pretty enough.”

Missy barks loudly. The girl scratches her behind the ear, but her gaze never leaves Lan Fan’s form, travelling across her body slowly, tracing the contours of her breasts and back. “Aye. You think we should? She ain’t got an arm. Ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

Ponytail clears his throat. “Had too much to drink?” he asks again, nervously fiddling with his collar.

Lan Fan stands, brushing the dirt from her knees. One part of her urges her to throw up a fighting stance, scare them off, but their _chi_ , other than that of Blond and for some reason that of the girl, contains not a hint of malicious intent. “I think that I’m all right,” she answers cautiously in Amestrisian. “What are you talking about?”

The girl snickers. “Only that you’re a pretty ‘un. You wanna sit with us, yah? We’ve got some beer. Better than that punch shit, too.”

“Heyo, ya can’t go’n give some floozy sumavar drink.” Scarlet shoots her a glare. With a powerful tug Missy snaps the leash from his grip; he topples onto his rear while Missy topples onto Lan Fan.

Eighty kilograms of pure fluff lick her face and snuffle at the scent of fish on her cheeks. Laughing brightly, she throws her arms up around the animal, _chi_ pure and flowing with distilled essence of joy and love. Ponytail approaches her in wide, light footsteps. “Sorry. Missy’s like that.”

“She’s wonderful.” Sitting up, Lan Fan somehow fits the dog into her lap. Her tail thumps against Lan Fan’s left sole in a curious sort of pain that she would never give up. Relaxing the tendons tensed since the house came into view, she probes Ponytail’s _chi_ and encounters either an experienced _chi_ reader capable of masking his true intentions and substituting a false double, or a kind man crouching beside her to inquire whether she’s hurt or not.

“Name’s Mike. You don’t have t’ get that beer if you don’t want t’.” He seems genuinely concerned, as if she didn’t already intend not to so much as smell the liquor. “Don’t mind Levi. He likes ‘em Xingese girls is all.”

Lan Fan scratches the dog behind the ears and listens to the thud-thudding of the tail grow in volume and speed smacking her leg. “I’m certain he does.” Not even an idiot could ruin her glowing mood. Certainly now she can forget the humiliation of the goings-on with Master Ling. “Or rather, I’m certain that he likes what he reads and hears about.”

Ponytail prods an abandoned, crushed can with the toe of his shoe. Kicks it back and forth between his feet. “What’d’ya mean?”

She shrugs. “I don’t read many Amestrisian novels, nor listen to the radio.” Missy’s tongue runs over her mouth, and Lan Fan spits, laughing quietly. “But all I ever hear are that we do what we’re told and we have small feet.”

“You don’t?” says Ponytail, and again she detects no trace of malevolent intent. On the other hand, _surprise_ writes itself over his features in his dilated pupils and eyebrows flown away into his hairline. “Sorry, didn’t mean no disrespect t’ you. I can see your feet aren’t all tiny.” She rolls her eyes and he backpedals incredibly speedily. “You Amestrisian, right? Like Xingese-Amestrisian?”

“I’m Xingese-Xingese.” Normally Lan Fan would simply ignore such a man under the legitimate impression that every woman of Xing binds her feet, but at the moment she welcomes the distraction. “No, not all of us have small feet. To do that you must bind them from birth, and it is very painful and means that you cannot walk well for the rest of your life. Mostly only the nobility force it on their daughters, who will never work a day in their lives.” Dangerously she approaches a chain of thought from _nobility_. The vassal begins to work out the matts and whorls in the dog’s dirt-encrusted fur. Her inhalation quick and painful, she checks Missy’s sides, but fortunately she neither feels malnourished ribs poking into her fingers nor an irregular swollen belly indicating worms. The dog’s not in poor condition. Merely an outside sort of animal.

Ponytail is bobbing his head. His bangs flap against his forehead. “I can see that. You . . . you quiet, too, or that just another not-really thing?”

Missy’s heartbeat thuds in Lan Fan’s palm. “It’s true that in Xing women are expected to be—” The word slips from her grasp. “—subservient. More than here in Amestris, at least, but that, too, is changing, and still not all women _are_ docile and humble as you think. Some are.” Her movements slow. She buries her hands in the dog’s shaggy coat. “Xing is not a single person for Amestris to gawk at.”

“‘Course.” Ponytail stoops down to pick up the kicked can. “You know Xingese?”

“Yes.”

“You eat rice?”

Lan Fan sighs. “Yes. I would say that the Xingese eat rice as Amestrisians eat bread. We eat much more besides.”

“‘Course,” he repeats. “You do any Xingese stuff?”

Missy yips, butting her head against Lan Fan’s stomach, and she returns her attention to the scritch-scratch ministrations of the dog. “Xingese ‘stuff’?”

He touches his index fingers together. “You know. You do any, uh, cultural stuff? That they don’t go in Amestris?” As the silence stretches, he rips it anew, never granting it the time to clothe them in quiet companionship. “Don’t think there’s anything _magicy-like_ about Xing. But there’s gotta be some differences ‘cross the desert.”

She studies him. He thrusts his hands into his pockets. Tension has not wrinkled his mouth or chin, and he leaves his lips parted, awaiting a response. Although he fidgets slightly, switching his stance presumably unconsciously, she recognised his nervousness upon observing him in the very beginning. After all, he may simply have taken an interest in Xing.

“If you mean alkahestry—” He rubs his ankles together unsteadily. “—Xingese alchemy, then no, I don’t.” To his credit his disappointment contorts his features merely for an evanescent quarter-second. “I do know some knifework, however, and the fighting styles of, of Xing.” Longji. Yet revealing her location to an utter stranger would mark her for a simpleton. As well, from his expression, he would likely nod and go home to wonder who this _Longji_ person is. “I could show you, as thanks for the dog. Equivalent exchange,” she explains levelly. Alphonse Elric would be proud; May Chang would stop her runted panda from biting her for once.

Ponytail quits his hands from his pockets to alight them on his hips. “Sounds good. You okay t’ do this?” Upon her nod he slides two fingers in his mouth and whistles. Scarlet, Blond, and the girl whip around, the Cretan carrying a portable icebox. “C’mere.”

Beer tabs pop. Gulps streak fuzz on upper lips. Scarlet nabs Missy’s leash and seats himself on the cement not yet chilled by the night, like walking past an open fire. The girl squats, her flared skirt barely covering her buttocks; Blond and Ponytail cross their legs.

Expectation.

Lan Fan fills her lungs with needed air, loosens her shoulders, stretches her arm along her side, curls her fingers into a fist, and remembers besting the Yao guardsmen to secure her position as Prince Yao’s retainer and guard-boy. Remembers, more recently, defeating every one of the Emperor’s current guards to prove her worth as a dirty _girl_ in their worthless eyes. Her kunai flip into her palm. When the huntsmen of the southern mountains went to war, her people took up the tools they used in their everyday lives converted them to acts of bloodshed and death. Now, in the footsteps of her ancestors, she takes the tools of bloodshed and death converts them to acts of entertainment.

She holds the word _murder_ on her tongue as she juggles and tosses and spins. The miniature crowd leans forward, eyes wide, mouths hanging open in their surprise. Looping a razor-thin garrote, invisible in the darkness, around one handle and tying it just as rapidly around another, Lan Fan begins a series of complicated hand gestures that sends the blades rotating around her wrist seemingly by themselves while she carefully watches their arcs, adjusting the position of her arm to ensure the wire snaps back prior to the kunai slashing into her. She narrows her world to include the blades and nothing but. Twirling. Flying. Free to hurt her, but she knows her kunai, and they will never harm her. Her steel hears the silent commands of tensed muscles and flicked wrists.

Her steel.

A phantom pain sears her port. A fire-hot knife slices into the flesh of her left arm, burning through throbbing flesh and meat. The corded tendons at her wrists fray and rip; the tips snap into her skin. When they retract into her body they carve paths of torture deep in the inside of the limb, scraping the white of her bone. Her veins burst at the wound. The ends drench her in a maddening scarlet pain. In fear she wiggles her fingers, clenches them: The agony of popped arteries and ragged-torn sinews blinds her.

Faintly she hears shrieks of worry and smells the sour-sweetness of spilled beer.

She awakens, first, to pain, which means she’s still alive, which is good; second, to _chi_ , the four stragglers and their dog around her; third, to sticky-damp on her eyelids and cheeks; fourth, to a kunai handle clutched in her right hand, her instincts never failing her; last, to Ponytail and Scarlet kneeling beside her. Scarlet dangles an empty can over her head. The moisture on her face. Beer. Instantly the boys butt in to question her state of being. Gingerly Lan Fan lifts herself up with her fingers on the back of her knee. The blade and garrote vanish into her trousers. She inspects her capped automail port. Nothing but smooth metal.

“You okay?” says Ponytail uncertainly. Scarlet’s eyebrows comes together in a furious _V_. Behind them, Blond and the girl look even angrier, balled fists and slitted eyes and flared nostrils.

“The hell did’ya say ya were a girl fer?” snarls Scarlet. Missy whines. “Dirty-ass chink.”

Ponytail frowns. “Levi, don’t do that t’ ‘im. Got a reason, I reckon.”

“Aye, he wanted to show up’n pretend to be all flashy?” The girl crosses her arms and juts her left hip out. “Or maybe he gay, yah?”

Scarlet opens his mouth and Blond punches him in the back of the head. Immediately Lan Fan lurches to her feet Sudden pressure-pain: a hot needle boring into the base of her skull. “Shut up.” Blond knees Ponytail in the chin. The boy drops. She reaches for the kunai concealed at her breast only to realise her lack of shirt. Her heart shudders in her chest even as her limbs grow numb. The Cretan glares at her behind smouldering verdant eyes. “What the fuck?”

Posing her arm between them, the blade tucked into her palm, Lan Fan shakes her head. “Where is my shirt?”

“No, the fuck are you doing traipsing around like a girl? Were you trying to catch some girl alone, you perverted freak?” Blond purses his lips, and the gesture would almost have been funny if he weren’t withdrawing a gun from a holster at his hip. “Can’t find yourself a girl, gotta sneak on one?”

She slams her heel into his shin. He jerks away, and she launches after him. Not to hurt him, no; she promised Master Ling. But she cannot allow a handgun to enter the fray. He dances away from her, agile and light, in a series of movements she recognises from her training. A Cretan variant of a martial art whose name escapes her but whose motions she knows well. “Where is my _shirt_?”

“Or you trying to trick some guy and then kill him? Don’t you fuckers eat dogs?” They dance past one another in a balance, neither here nor there. Anticipating his route of escape she lunges and grips his wrist. The edge of the kunai slices wetly through the outer layer of his arm. He shrieks, rocking backwards, and her ears pop from the piercing sound. Blood splatters their feet. She sinks the blade in deeper, deeper, until she hears the gun clatter on cement. “You fucking shithead! I’ll fucking kill you!”

Leaving the knife in his arm she pounces for the gun. Clicks the safety on. “Where did you put my shirt?” she says. Calm. Exquisitely so. A sword wrapped in the most opulent silk, pointed just to the left of his chest.

He throws her a right punch, where she can’t block, but she ducks. His hanging left arm unbalances him. Thud. Crouching, she cautiously eases the blade from its puckered prison. The blood sprays over her torso. He tries to scuttle away; she forces him down with a knee in his stomach. “Hold still.” Unwrapping a line of wrapping from her abdomen, she cuts the linen and crafts him a makeshift bandage as deftly as she can with a single hand. _Chi_ : Scarlet and Ponytail are yet unconscious; Missy and the girl loiter on the far end of the cement, perhaps seeking help if she’s any wit at all. Spots of red seep through the material digging into his arm. His eyes have rolled back into his head, tears a milky film on the whites. Respectfully she turns her attention to covering her breasts with her forearm like a belt across her chest. “You’ll want to see someone. That should stop the bleeding for the time being. _Now_.” Her voice hardens. “Where is my damn _shirt_?”

Suddenly: Wingflaps of escaping birds. The initial impact feels akin to the time Master Ling tossed a snowball at the back of her head and the wet chill slid into her shirt to frost over her left shoulder blade. In that fleeting window before the crippling pain, she launches the kunai handle-first. The circle of metal meets the girl’s forehead. Knocked back, she floats a moment, two, and crumples to the ground like a house of cards collapsing inwards on itself.

Lan Fan’s final action is to buck her knees downwards. Then the spark of cold transforms into a raging inferno that chars streaks of agony the vassal’s skin. Pain eats up the forked nerves and jolts lightning into her fingertips. She kneels, arm on her chest, elbow on her thigh, and convulses. The torture runs through her.

Her teeth chatter.

“I won’t faint,” she chants in her native tongue. “I won’t faint. I won’t faint. I won’t faint. I won’t faint.” Four syllables that sound out a martial drum. Her breathing steadies. The pain subsides into a raw, acute throb constricting with each pulse of her heart. Shakily the vassal stands. She waits for her stance to firm into broad, flat feet and unmoving, slightly bent knees.

She reaches back to circumscribe the wound. Blood dampens the hem of her pants and begins to leak into the fabric along her rear. Grimacing she feels the stretched, shorn skin at the circumference indicative of the ragged meat within. With every heartbeat her tissues compress around the fiery bullet still inside her. When she attempts to lift her shoulder her muscle screams from the pain and her eyes sting. Haltingly Lan Fan stoops to free the Cretan of his shirt. Gripping it between her teeth, she cuts out the shoulders and collar of the reverse side before fitting it on herself. She looks down: The new garment shields her breasts from view but doesn’t ride on the injury. Perfect.

A thread of sweat trickles down the slope of her back and into the wound. She feels herself sinking into darkness, yet she clutches that note of pride to return to the light. Presently: Checking Scarlet and Ponytail. Alive. Blond. Breathing and less injured than she. The girl. A strenuous walk towards her; the ache and agony cook her flesh from the inside out. Also alive, also breathing, but with an indentation drifting right of the centre of her brow. Lan Fan’s upper teeth knead her bottom lip. No time. She collects the kunai lying a half-metre away and scans the surroundings. Missy has scattered into the bushes surrounding the lot. Brownish, wiry bushes, born of the desert. Within them the dog is a splotch of quivering scarlet ink.

Lan Fan limps over, fumbles for the leash, and ties it loosely around the thick, woody trunk of the closest bush. Missy whimpers. She pets the dog’s head, once. Then she calms herself and starts the long sojourn to the back door.

Abruptly said door flies open. An Aeruogan-brown man rushes out. In his fist hangs a white box inscribed with a radiantly red alchemy seal. “What’s going on?” he yells, the air ringing from echoes of the sound.

Lan Fan sees the world from the perspective of the door: A woman in a destitute top, coated in blood, carrying a gun and a blade, the sole survivor of a scene with four apparently immotile bodies and a frightened animal yipping in the vegetation. Birds wheel uneasily in the sky. The horned moon leers amid a sea of knowing stars.

She drops to her knees, again. The cement scrapes her legs even through her pants. She arranges the weapons by her thighs and looks up.

“Where is Master Ling?” she says. Fast, too fast, with a fervent excitement as though she can’t bring herself to consider the matter.

Winry squeezes herself past the man with a rapid apology. Iron-vice arms crush the vassal into the older woman’s breasts. “Lan Fan Lan Fan Lan Fan. Are you okay are you bleeding I heard gunshots and Skylar hurry up this is Skylar Oliver and he’s going to help you I promise.” Words pour from her mouth until Lan Fan merely inclines her head. Winry’s shirt enfolds her cheeks, caresses them in warmth. A continuous river of noise, not even the meaning but the tender tone lessening the strain.

The man squats beside her and says something in a low warning of a timbre. A gush of cold moisture on her shoulder blade. Agony. Her teeth crunch together, her jaw vibrating from the pressure, the pointed caps of her molars not quite cracking. Tears— _no_. No tears. Not on her life.

She hears the unrolling of canvas. No: bandages. He grunts. Winry whispers, and the urgency throws the empty sounds into sharp relief: “He needs you to take off your shirt.”

“ _No_.” Wú. Wú wú wú wú _wú_.

“Let me do it. I think they might’ve done something.” The man shifts away. Winry leans away. Alone. Empty. “Lan Fan, could you _please_ lift your shirt? Can I at least take you somewhere else?”

Her voice wobbles from her throat creased-parchment worn. “This one’ll dress myself.”

“Can you walk?” Oliver puts in.

Winry bats his hands away and urges Lan Fan to her feet. Somehow she does, and somehow she follows Winry through the main room, numbly feeling the weight of a hundred gazes encumbering her to the unrelentless earth. His _chi_ startles her.

Ling pushes through the crowd, forcing his way towards her. Turning from Winry she sees the worry aging his face beyond his years, and she’s reminded violently of what he gave up when he cast the parasitic homunculus from his soul. He bursts into Xingese: “Are you okay?”

“This one is fine.”

Winry snags both of them by the wrists and drags them onwards. Upstairs. Her shoulder complains at every motion. Ling’s _chi_ flares around her in ribbons of quicksilver. Oliver follows at a respectful distance. Soon Paninya joins them, her automail feet clanging noisily up the stairs that creak beneath her heels.

Opening a door to an orderly bedroom festooned with one-tone posters, Winry indicates the bathroom, hands her the medical kit, and passes over a white pyjama top. She shuts the door firmly. Ling protests, and Lan Fan hears a slap and silence. She grabs the edge of the toilet seat cover to restrain herself from breaking down the door and breaking through the bones of Winry’s offending hand. Instead she examines herself in the mirror. Peroxide bubbles at the rim. With a wet towel she carefully wipes away the blood, cleaning the wound despite the awkward, painful angle. If her grandfather were here—

But he isn’t, and she is.

Oliver pounds on the door. “Were you shot? If you need to remove the bullet, let me apply anesthesia or something.”

She cleans off a narrow pair of pliers in the tap, narrow enough she handles them as she would tweezers. Removing the black shirt, she wads up the fabric and jostles it between her teeth. She bites down until her mouth reeks of the salty-sweet scent of sweat and the arid taste of cotton. Observing her reflection, she locks her jaw. Slips the pliers inside.

Her body shrieks. Bending down, she props up her elbow on the counter and fits the pliers in deeper. The metal scrapes along the inner walls of her body. The convulsions of her tissue around the bullet at least points her to the direction and depth of the foreign object. She finds it amid searing pain. A fresh spurt of blood tribbles from the wound as she begins to draw it out millimetre by millimetre. The bullet slips out of her grip and lodges back into her flesh. An irrepressible moan rolls from her vocal cords. The knob jiggles frantically. Lan Fan starts up again and this time she loses the bullet after withdrawing it. The wasted grey point of pain scatters somewhere on the floor. Tossing the pliers into the sink, she hunts along the white tiles, following the droplets of scarlet. The bullet wedged between the toilet bowl and the bathtub retains bits of her stuck to the surface like wolfberry jam. She leaves that in the sink as well. Another addition of peroxide to cleanse the potential vestiges of dirt, sweat, or metal from the injury. Murmuring the steps drilled into her over years of her grandfather’s tutelage, Lan Fan cleans and dresses the wound tightly, replacing her breast bindings. No red visible through the linen. Slipping on the clean shirt, she checks: Sky blue. Pyjama top. Not her favoured colour, Liu colour, but she’ll manage for now.

She tries a smile. Her reflection grimace-sneers.

Lan Fan opens the door only to have to catch Oliver’s fist while he continues to knock. “Ah—shit, my bad.” The man steps back and abruptly a combination of Ling, Winry, and Paninya crowd her en masse, voices mingling in frantic questions.

“Are you okay?!”

“What did that bastard do?”

“Lan Fan.”

“Do I gotta castrate him for you?”

“How badly did’e hurt you?”

“I’m sorry.”

She lifts her arm to stop the onslaught. Oliver likewise raises a hand. “Excuse me, sir, but could I ask a question?”

 _Sir_. She tries to link her fingers, inhales, and dips her head. “Yes, Mr Oliver.”

“Jacques, the young man whom you assaulted, says that you’re actually . . .” He hesitates as if considering not saying anything at all, and Winry puts her hands warningly on her hips. “That you’re actually a young man masquerading as a girl to lure the partygoers in.”

If Lan Fan were to faint, say from the exhaustion, stress, and residual ache, she would awaken in a soft bed, perhaps with a concerned Master Ling beside her, far removed from the crushing spearhead of his sentence.

“What the fuck you talkin’ about?” Paninya retorts, folding her arms across her chest. “Lan Fan isn’t—huh?”

Ling is shaking his head, slowly. His fingers outline the knuckles of her hand until she loosens her fist and he traces circles in her palm with his thumb. “Mr Oliver,” he says, his timbre gone deep, Greed-deep, Emperor-deep, “I can assure you she was doing no such thing.”

No such thing, she remembers, as no such thing.

“I apologise sincerely on my behalf and hers for disrupting your party. We’ll be going now. I _will_ ,” he stresses to the man’s doubtful expression, “explain, but later. Please. _She’s_ been shot and is in no condition to have this discussion at the moment.”

Winry stretches herself erect. “Skylar, thank you for having us. We’ll be going now. Have a good one without us, ‘kay?”

“All right.” His gaze fire-brands the back of Lan Fan’s head as her trio of guardians escort her from the bedroom, through the party, outside of the house.

The phonogram lies in two broken sections in the middle of the room.


End file.
